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This study examines the network of supply and use of significant innovations across industries in Sweden, 1970-2013. It is found that 30% of innovation patterns can be predicted by network stimulus from backward and forward linkages. The…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Novelty alone is not sufficient for innovation. For new ideas and products to thrive, they must find their place within the existing societal fabric, such as institutions, conventions, and infrastructures that have been built over time.…
We study several models of growth driven by innovation and imitation by a continuum of firms, focusing on the interaction between the two. We first investigate a model on a technology ladder where innovation and imitation combine to…
We provide a theoretical framework to understand when firms may benefit from exploiting previously abandoned technologies and brands. We model for the long run process of innovation, allowing for sustainable diversity and comebacks of old…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may…
We develop a new framework for modeling innovation networks which evolve over time. The nodes in the network represent firms, whereas the directed links represent unilateral interactions between the firms. Both nodes and links evolve…
Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process,…
One new thing often leads to another. Such correlated novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also thought to be fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities,…
We introduce a model for the emergence of innovations, in which cognitive processes are described as random walks on the network of links among ideas or concepts, and an innovation corresponds to the first visit of a node. The transition…
We consider inventions as novel combinations of existing technological capabilities. Patent data allow us to explicitly identify such combinatorial processes in invention activities. Unconsidered in the previous research, not every new…
We propose Local Optima Networks (LONs) as a formal framework for modeling innovation dynamics. A LON is a directed weighted graph in which nodes represent locally stable technological configurations and edges encode transition…
Innovation records often exhibit "hockey-stick" patterns of abrupt, near-singular growth at the collective level. However, this macroscopic explosiveness stands in stark contrast to individual discovery, which remains bounded by cognitive…
A long-standing discussion is to what extent patents can be used to monitor trends in innovation activity. This study quantifies the amount and quality of information about actual innovation contained in the patent system, based on 4,460…
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
A detailed empirical analysis of the productivity of non financial firms across several countries and years shows that productivity follows a non-Gaussian distribution with power law tails. We demonstrate that these empirical findings can…